1. 1 What is it Like to Be a College Freshman? Thinking about Consciousness

2. 2 What is consciousness?  Historically … didn’t seem like the sort of thing we could study scientifically, so it was ignored.  Hard to define First person, subjective, experience “What it’s like” to see red to be a college freshman

3. 3 What are Qualia?  A core concept of consciousness The basic elements of consciousness properties that are “ineffable, intrinsic, private, and immediately apprehensible in consciousness” (Dennett)  A dispute in studies of consciousness has to do with whether they even exist as a property of experience, or whether it is just a corollary of the “real” properties of experience.

4. 4 THE BIG QUESTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS  Is consciousness an extra ingredient that we humans have in addition to our abilities of perceiving, thinking, and feeling, or is it an intrinsic and inseparable part of being a creature that can perceive and think and feel?  Or:  Is consciousness a special added extra that we conscious humans are lucky to have, or is it something that necessarily comes along with all those evolved skills of perceiving, thinking, and feeling?  (Susan Blakemore)

5. 5 One Answer—We Can’t Know  This is the Mysterian position Logically speaking, there are going to be things that humans won’t possess the capability of knowing  e.g. Nagel (weak mysterian) Until we can explain conscious experience, we can’t say whether materialism is true If we could explain what it was like to see red to a blind person, so that they would recognize it if their sight was restored, THEN we could say that we understand consciousness

6. 6 Thought Experiments  Mary the Neuroscientist When Mary first sees red, she learns something new, “what it’s like.” Therefore, materialism can’t explain qualia If it could, she would have known what it’s like from the facts about the brain  Absent-qualia Zombies Nothing in materialism can rule out the possibility of zombies. This shows that there are facts about conscious experience that are left out of the materialist account.

7. 7 The Explanatory Gap  The idea that there is no way to ever fully explain consciousness, because… there is no way to get a third-person perspective on qualia (inherently first-person experience) there is something about consciousness that will escape scientific explanation, even when science gets further along than it is now.

8. 8 Chalmers—A New Dualism  Easy problem: Deals with “the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system” (p. 81), for example: How are humans able to discriminate? How does the brain work? We have every reason to think science will answer these questions.  Hard Problem: “Is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience.” showing a correlation is not sufficient We need an account of why qualia necessarily come with brain activity. This is something that physical science can’t answer—we need a new science to deal with it.

9. 9 Consciousness is Not Extra Possible Answers  Conscious experience provides information that can be used in cognition. Lalor, Van Gulick  In order to process information at the speed we do, something like consciousness is going to arise. N. Humphrey  It’s an illusion that comes from complex perception Dennett (?)

10. 10 Ramachandran  “Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalization of things you really do for other reasons”  Studying anomalies in perception: Phantom limbs, Blindsight, Visual Neglect, Capgras Syndrome, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy “will take us a long way toward answer the riddle of the benefits of consciousness and why it evolved.”  Is this enough to meet Chalmers’ challenge? Or would Chalmers say that this merely shows that consciousness correlates with brain activity?